Does Manual Harvesting Improve the Quality of Wine?

The answer is; “Absolutely!”

Good winemaking is not only about wine-philosophy and tradition, understanding the details that play a vital role in quality winemaking, is essential. For instance, the way grapes are picked is highly important.

Of course mechanical harvesting is faster and works well when covering vast quantities of wine fields, but if you want to produce a fine wine that takes time. Manual harvesting is more time consuming, however it not only allows for a better grape selection, it also helps to avoid crushing the grapes which is a huge benefit as oxidation begins once the grape skins have been punctured. Also, by using smaller containers to transfer the grapes reduces the amount of grapes damaged during harvest.

During years of bad harvest when the grapes have been attacked by fungal diseases, manual grape picking also helps avoid that infested grapes end up as part of the finished product.

In case you did not know, Cloud9Wines only work with wineries that promote manual grape picking. All of our selected wineries do the harvest by hand using 10-12kg grape boxes.

In my opinion high quality wine makers choose hand picking.